SHELL OIL TO BE IN NEW YORK COURT OVER ALLEGED ROLE IN NIGER EXECUTIONS

Thanks to The Guardian and Ridwan for this story:

Ken Saro-Wiwa swore that one day Shell, the oil giant, would answer for his death in a court of law. Next month, 14 years after his execution, the Nigerian environmental activist's dying wish is to be fulfilled.

In a New York federal court, Shell and one of its senior executives are to face charges that in the early 1990s in Nigeria they were complicit in human rights abuses, including summary execution and torture.

The Anglo-Dutch company, if found liable, could be forced to pay hundreds of millions of pounds in damages. No multinational has ever been found guilty of human rights abuses, although two previous cases saw major claims settled outside court.

Saro-Wiwa became famous as a campaigner on behalf of the Ogoni people, leading peaceful protests against the environmental damage caused by oil companies in the Niger Delta. There was worldwide condemnation when, along with eight other activists, he was hanged by the Nigerian military government in 1995 after being charged with incitement to murder after the death of four Ogoni elders. Many of the prosecution witnesses later admitted that they had been bribed to give evidence against Saro-Wiwa, who was a respected television writer and businessman.

As shocking as this sounds, and it is shocking that a corporation like Shell could be involved in murder and mayhem, it is hardly new.

Ford Motor Company was involved in Argentina's time of terror in the 70's. From The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein:

It was in Argentina, however, that the involvement of Ford's local subsidiary with the terror apparatus was most overt. The company supplied cars to the military, and the green Ford Falcon sedan was the vehicle used for thousands of kidnappings and disappearances. The Argentine psychologist and playwright Eduardo Pavlovsky described the car as "the symbolic expression of terror. A death-mobile."'

After the coup in Argentina,

"The Ford factory in suburban Buenos Aires was turned into an armed camp; in the weeks that followed, it was swarming with military vehicles, including tanks and helicopters buzzing overhead. Workers have testified to the presence of a battalion of one hundred soldiers permanently stationed at the factory. "It looked like we were at war with Ford. And it was all directed at us, the workers," recalled Pedro Troiani one of the union delegates.

She continues:

"Soldiers prowled the facility grabbing and hooding the most active union members, helpfully pointed out by the factory foreman. Troiani was among pulled of the assembly line. He recalled that "before detaining me, they walked me around the factory, they did it right out in the open so that the people would see: Ford did this to eliminate unionism in the factory." Most startling was what happened next: rather than being rushed off to a nearby prison, Troiani and others say soldiers took them to a detention facility that had been set up inside the factory gates. (Bold from me)

In their place of work, where they had been negotiating contracts just days before, workers were beaten, kicked and in two cases electroshocked. They were taken to outside prisons where the torture continued for weeks and, in some cases, months. According to the workers' lawyers, at least twenty-five Ford union reps were kidnapped in the period, half of them detained on the company grounds in a facility that human rights groups in Argentina are lobbying to have placed on an official list of former clandestine detention facilities."

According to Klein,

"In 2002 federal prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against Ford Argentina on behalf of Troiani and fourteen other workers, alleging that the company is legally responsible for the repression that took place on its property. "Ford [Argentina] and its executives colluded in the kidnapping of its own workers, and I think they should be held responsible for that," says Troiani. Mercedes-Benz (a subsidiary of Daimler-Chrysler) is facing a similar investigation stemming from allegations that the company collaborated with the military during the 1970s to purge one of its plants of union leaders, allegedly giving names and addresses of sixteen workers who were later disappeared, fourteen of the permanently.

According to the Latin American historian Karen Robert, by the end of the dictatorship, "virtually all the shop-floor delegates had been disappeared from the country's biggest firms...such as Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler, and Fiat Concord." Both Ford and Mercedes-Benz deny that their executives played any role in the repression. The cases are ongoing.

Think it can't happen here in the United States?

A link to the BBC regarding a suit against Ford.

I'm going to follow this case and post over time.

Thanks to Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, pp 108, 109

Peace

KATRINA AID ARRIVES IN NEW ORLEANS

How long has it been since Katrina? According to CNN, trucks began to arrive in N.O. with aid that has been locked in a warehouse for two years. This is another sign of the United States being a failed state as described by Noam Chomsky.

This is just one of the many reasons I am not voting Republican this time. Every citizen of the US should read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine.

I bought it just after it came out and I am on my second read of the book. Ms. Klein does an exceptional job at researching Milton Friedman's economics, and the linking of his Chicago School of Economics to individuals such as Pinochet of Chile, Ronald Reagan, Bush's 1&2 and others.

The free marketers used the disaster after Katrina while the populace was still in shock to wipe out social programs and privatize a number of different things such as the school system. This was also used in the aftermath of the Tsunami of 2004. The fishing villages that had been on the beaches for generations are now in the hands of a few hoteliers and the people that made their living fishing are now ejected off of their land and their land given to another.

Sound familiar?

Let's face it: Kanye West was right. George Bush does not like Black people. The poor Black people of the Lower Ninth Ward in N.O. will never see their homes rebuilt. They are not welcome there any longer, and this was a perfect opportunity to commandeer their land and hand it over to someone else.

It is time for change in the US. The trickle down economics of the Reagan era DO NOT WORK. I agree with John Keynes. There can be a balance of social programs, and private ventures. In fact there has to be. Let's face it. There are people out there that need a helping hand up, yet the federal and state legistatures for the past 28 years has made a concerted effort to oppress the oppressed even more. The cutting of social programs, the laughable focus on education-primary, secondary, and higher-and the specific targeting of the people of color (individuals can deny that it is racially motivated but it is) the turning of backs on the urban centers of the US has done nothing but create a bigger gap between the haves and have nots. I believe it is time to make that gap smaller.

The Federal government must make higher education a priority. The US must provide free higher education for all individuals that want to take advantage of it. We must provide housing for the poor, food for the hungry, clothes for the naked. We must provide health care for all, that is medical, dental, vision. It is time to stop the elite corporations and corporate America from running this country. It is time to stop Corporate welfare.

The American society vilifies the individual that needs subsidized yet the Feds pump billions of dollars worth of subsidies into massive corporations while these corps make record profit.

Did you know in the State of Washington the income cap for a family of three to receive food stamps is a mere $1861? This may seem like a lot to someone outside of the US in some countries, however, it is a pittance here. I am going on a crusade to change the attitude of people in the Untied States regarding taking care of our fellow man. For children to go hungry in the US is outrageous. For men and women to go hungry or be homeless is shameful. I know I have my work cut out for me when I hear people as young as 24 say things like: "The homeless are homeless because they're lazy." What a joke. Most homeless people are people that suffer from mental illness, that can be treated if the US had a reasonable medical system that was not based on profit, but was based on care. Which brings me to another statement.

People employed by insurance companies that deny services to a customer that pays premiums for health coverage that results in the death or permanent disability of the individual or individual covered by the policy issued b that company must be brought up on criminal charges. Have you ever seen Michael Moore's Sicko? There is a scene in which a woman while testifying before Congress is describing how, as a physician, she stamped "DENIED" on perhaps hundreds of claims that resulted in peoples' deaths. Why is this woman not being held accountable for these peoples' deaths? If I knowingly withheld medical treatment from my child while having the financial means to provide for my child and my baby died, I would be charged with a crime. The same ought to apply to individuals that work for Aetna, or Kaiser, Or Blue Cross, etc. Start holding the companies accountable and charging the individuals, that deny, better yet charge the CEO with murder and this will stop.

I will work to ensure that insurance companies are held accountable for their actions.

It is time to think about each other, to tap into a desire to build each other up instead of tearing one another down, and it is time for the self-centeredness and the "I'm gonna get mine" attitude in the US to change.

Peace to you and let's work together for change.

Images courtesy of ebooknetworking.com and sicko-movie.com